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Caroline Jane Harris

London
Fine Artist with a Masters degree, specialising in hand-cut paper, printmaking, photography and drawing
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In my practice I examine traditional and contemporary printmaking, drawing and photography, from analogue to digital means. I make enquiries into materiality, digitality and the artist’s hand, to explore questions around our urgent relationship with nature in the information age.

During my undergraduate studies in Printmaking, frustrated with woodcut tools I reimagined woodblock printing, reordering the process to the point where I directly cut out prints on paper with a scalpel. Printing presses were originally invented as a means for disseminating ideas more widely as part of the industrial revolution which mobilised the materiality of the earth, whilst playing a part in disconnecting us from nature. My deliberate use of printmaking-derived processes combined with the subject of nature, can be seen as a way to inversely reconnect us with nature and communicate the most important social debates around climate, environment and sustainability.

To make my work, I intricately cut into layers of hand-made paper and digital prints from pixelated images. For my subject matter, I strive to make works that touch on the universal and transcendental by sensitively responding to visual phenomena from the environment; the endless recurring patterns found in all levels of existence across time and cultures. The fragility of the papercuts is analogous to not only anxiety around the dissolution of physical images in the digital age, but the perpetual innovation and destruction that drives the digital realm, referenced where vulnerable paper strands break from the picture plane.

My diligent process presents an alternative to the cultural devaluation of slowed time and attention by accelerating technologies, offering up an absorbing viewing experience that forefronts traditional craftsmanship. The inherent process of slowing down in my practice acts as a counterbalance to our increasingly busy lives.

 

 

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